The boats that take the Moroccans home

by Pierre Daum

Three boats take care of transporting people from Sète to Tangiers: the Biladi (with 1,200 berths) which belongs to Comarit, a private Moroccan company, and the two ferries chartered by Comanav, a state-owned Moroccan company – the Marrakesh (620 berths) and the Marrakesh Express (830 berths).

These three boats alone transport 200,000 passengers a year, “90% of whom are Moroccan immigrants”, according to Philippe Sala, the boss of Euromer, a travel agency in Montpelier which handles two-thirds of this cross-Mediterranean traffic. “This traffic is exploding. Before, the families would drive the extra 1,500 kilometres through Spain as far as Algeciras. But the dads are getting on. They’re older and richer and prefer to stop at Sète and pay for the luxury of a little cruise.”

Sala had reason to look pleased, for the Moroccan government has just sold Comanav to CMA-CGM, the powerful maritime freight company (third biggest in the world) belonging to Jacques Saadé, a French-Lebanese working out of Marseille. Next January the CMA-CGM may decide to provide the Sète-Tangiers crossing with new boats. “We’ve had enough of these 30-year-old wrecks that don’t do more than 18 knots,” said Sala happily. “With new boats we’d get them up to 28 knots and then we’d be able to offer our clients 24-hour crossings.”